by Chris Farago.
I promise not to wander off without you.
The woods are dark and odd and possibly full of elms,
And I know how you hate elms,
So I will take you by the hand, by the wrist,
By whatever you need to be taken by to feel safe,
And I will steer you through the pines
And the birch and the oak
And yes, even those potentially lurking elms.
I never learned why you hate them so–
I honestly thought you had a problem with the lobed leaves
Until I remembered that those are the oaks,
And another bit of my foundation of knowledge fell away:
Even the red juniper I thought I’d run to is now blue.
(I could not help myself from writing this third stanza, even less so in putting the damn thing inside of parentheses. The second was far too wordy [not verbose, but just wordy], and will be much better under the eye of a handsomely-paid editor [the same cannot be said for this stanza, which is far too gone to be saved and exists merely to be lopped off like the low-hanging fruit that it is {please know that the word “machete-like” is drifting around in this head of mine with absolutely no place to put it in this sentence}]. The thought of guiding you safely through a moonlit forest was sincere, but it is patently [painfully?] clear now that some things just cannot be saved.)